Consumers, individuals, and enterprise utilize a variety of applications in their daily life, including Microsoft® Office from Microsoft Corp. and SAP® software from SAP SE. In the enterprise environment, applications may need to evolve as the enterprise evolves its information technology (IT) infrastructure, invests in new areas, or improves employee productivity. In the general consumer environment, marketplace development also contributes. Therefore, an IT department, or individual developers will be obliged at a certain point to make updates to the applications that employees or consumers use; and as with any application upgrade, change also brings a non-zero chance that a process capability will be inadvertently broken.
Historically, in the enterprise environment, when applications are deployed to users the deployment is accomplished by physically installing the application package (which may be tens of megabytes or more) onto a disk image, and then this disk image is copied to a user's personal computer (PC). Significant investment is required to re-image all employee's machines with a new version and it is even more costly if this must be repeated to fix a bug in that new version. For the general consumer, installing and uninstalling applications can also be a challenge.